I sit down at the piano. Presently Frau Beckmann appears in her salmon-colored kimono. She is not so imperturbable as formerly; her mountainous breasts heave as though an earthquake were raging beneath them, and her eyes have a different expression. She does not look at Karl Brill.
“Clara,” Karl says, “you know the gentlemen here except for Herr Schweizer.” He makes an elegant gesture. “Herr Schweizer—”
The seal bows with an astonished and rather worried expression. He glances at the money and then at this foursquare Brünhilde. The nail is wrapped in cotton, and Clara takes up her position. I play the double trill and stop. Everyone is silent.
Frau Beckmann stands there, calm and concentrated. Then two quivers pass through her body. Suddenly she casts a wild glance at Karl Brill. “Sorry!” she grits through clenched teeth. “It won’t go.”
She moves away from the wall and leaves the workroom. “Clara!” Karl screams.
She does not reply. The seal emits a burst of oily laughter and begins to pick up the money. The drinking companions are as though struck by lightning. Karl Brill groans, rushes over to the nail, and comes back. “Just a minute!” he says to the seal. “Just a minute, we’re not through yet! We bet on three tries. These were just the first two!”
“There were three.”
“You’re no judge of that! You’re new here. It was two!”
Sweat is now running down Karl’s skull. The drinking companions have found their tongues again. “It was two,” they asseverate.
An argument ensues. I do not listen. I feel as though I . were sitting on an alien planet. It is a brief, intense, and horrible feeling, and I am happy when I can follow the voices again. The seal has exploited the situation; he will grant a third try if there is a further wager thirty-seventy in his favor. Sweating, Karl agrees to everything. As far as I can see, he had wagered half his workshop, including the soiling machine. “Come here!” he whispers to me. “Come upstairs with me! We must change her mind! She did that on purpose.”
We climb the stairs. Frau Beckmann has been waiting for Karl. She is lying on her bed in the kimono decorated with a phoenix, excited, marvelously beautiful to anyone who likes big women, and ready for battle. “Clara!” Karl whispers. “Why this? You did it on purpose.”
“So?” Frau Beckmann says.
“Of course you did! I know it! I swear to you—”
“Don’t swear anything! You beast, you slept with the cashier at the Hotel Hohenzollern! You disgusting swine!”
“I? What a lie! How do you know about it?”
“You see, you admit it!”
“I admit it?”
“You have just admitted it! You asked how I knew. How could I know it, if it isn’t true?”
I look with sympathy at Karl Brill, the breast-stroke expert. He has no fear of water no matter how cold, but here he is out of his depth. On the stairs I have advised him not to get into an argument but simply to plead with Frau Beckmann on his knees and beg her forgiveness, without, of course, admitting anything. Instead, he is now reproaching her with a certain Herr Kletzel. Her answer is a fearful blow in the nose. Karl leaps backwards, feels his snout to see whether it is bleeding, and then with a cry of rage moves forward in a crouch like an experienced fighter to seize Frau Beckmann by the hair, pull her out of bed, place one foot on the back of her neck, and to go to work on her mighty hams with his braces. I give him a fairly stiff kick in the rear. He turns around, ready to attack me too, sees my warning glance, my raised hands, and my silently whispering mouth and awakens from his thirst for blood. Human reason shines once more from his brown eyes. He nods briefly, with blood now gushing from his nose, turns around, and sinks down on his knees beside Frau Beckmann’s bed with the cry: “Clara! I have done nothing, but forgive me!”
“You pig!” she screams. “You double pig! My kimono!”
She jerks the precious garment aside. Karl is bleeding onto the sheets. “Damned liar!” she trumpets. “And lying still!”
I notice that Karl, a simple, honorable man, who expected an immediate reward for falling on his knees, is about to get up again in rage. If he starts another boxing match while his nose is bleeding, all is lost. Perhaps Frau Beckmann will forgive him for the cashier at the Hohenzollern, but never for ruining her kimono. I step on his foot from behind, holding him down with one hand on his shoulder, and say: “Frau Beckmann, he is innocent! He sacrificed himself for me.”
“What?”
“For me,” I repeat “That happens often among old war comrades—”
“What? You and your damned war camaraderie, you liars and cheaters—and you expect me to believe something like that!”
“Sacrificed himself!” I say. “He introduced me to the cashier, that was all.”
Frau Beckmann straightens up with flaming eyes. “You want me to believe that a young man like you would hanker after an old worn-out bag like that cadaver at the Hohenzollern!”
“Not hanker after, gnädige Frau,” I say. “But when needs must, the devil eats flies. If loneliness has you by the throat—”
“A young man like you could surely do better!”
“Young, but poor,” I reply. “Nowadays women want to be taken to expensive bars. And while we’re speaking about it, you’ll have to admit that if you doubt that a bachelor like me living alone and caught in the storm of the inflation could be interested in the cashier, it would be completely absurd to suspect anything of the sort of Karl Brill, who enjoys the favors of the most beautiful and interesting woman in all of Werdenbrück—undeservedly, I admit—”
This last makes an impression. “He’s a beast!” Frau Beckmann says. “And undeservedly is right.”
Karl takes a hand. “Clara, you are my life!” he moans hollowly from the bloody sheets.
“I’m your bank account, you cold-blooded devil!” Frau Beckmann turns back to me. “And what about that half-dead she donkey at the Hohenzollern?”
I dismiss the creature. “Nothing, not a thing! It came to nothing at all! She turned my stomach.”
“I could have told you that in advance!” she declares with deep satisfaction.
The battle had been decided. We are now engaged in a rear-guard action. Karl promises Clara a sea-green kimono with lotus blossoms, and swansdown slippers. Then he goes to bathe his nose in cold water and Frau Beckmann gets up. “How high are the bets?” she asks.
“High,” I reply. “Trillions.”
“Karl!” she shouts. “Cut Herr Bodmer in for two hundred and fifty billion.”
“Of course, Clara!”
We stride down the stairs. Below sits the seal, guarded by Karl’s friends. We find out that he has tried to cheat while we were away, but Karl’s drinking companions tore the hammer away in time. Frau Beckmann smiles haughtily, and thirty seconds later the nail lies on the floor. Majestically she stalks out to the accompanying strains of “Alpine Sunset,”
“A friend in need is a friend indeed,” Karl says to me emotionally later on.
“Question of honor! But what’s all this about the cashier?”
“What’s a man to do?” Karl replies. “You know how you feel sometimes in the evenings! But to think the bitch talked! I’m going to withdraw my patronage from those people. But you, dear friend—choose whatever you like!” He points to his array of leathers. “A first-class pair of shoes made to order as a gift—whatever you like: black buckskin, brown, yellow, patent leather, doeskin—I’ll make them for you myself—”
“Patent leather,” I say.